Advances in microprocessor and related technology have lead to widespread development and the adoption of computing devices. Computing powers that used to be available only in expensive mainfne computers requiring special operating environments are now available in many personal computing devices. The form factors vary from desktop, laptop, palm sized and so forth. A number of these computing devices are packaged as “special purpose” devices, such as set top boxes, entertainment personal digital assistants (“PDA”), pagers, text messengers, smart appliances and wireless mobile phones.
Concurrently, advances in networking, telecommunications and related technologies, in particular, in the area of wireless networking/communications, have lead to increased connectivity between the computing devices, over local, private, wide area, and/or public networks. Of particular notoriety is the Internet public network.
To facilitate communications between a wide range of devices, various electronic means of communications, such as electronic mails, instant messages, and so forth have been developed. Instant messaging (“IM”) protocols and services have been implemented by a variety of service providers, such as America On-Line's AIM protocol and Microsoft's MSN Instant Messenger protocol. Both services have a large number of subscribers.
At the same time, these and other related factors contributed to the availability of rich content and functionality available from a variety of devices, including sophisticated games employing complex 3-D graphics to provide realistic rendering of game scenes. Recently, this availability of connected devices has made significant advances in the area of the joint consumption of multi-media content, including online multi-user gaming.
However, these IM protocols and services do not specify ways to integrate the IM with joint multi-user content consumption, including online multi-player gaming. There is no indication of how IM protocols or services could initiate such joint multi-user content consumption, including online multi-player gaming. Further, the capability of IM protocols and services have been under exploited for the advancement and adoption of content, including games, in particular, online multi-user games.